Is it "okay" to make yourself a slave to mathematics and live in social isolation to the end of your days?

Is it "okay" to make yourself a slave to mathematics and live in social isolation to the end of your days?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project
polymathprojects.org/
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

The intersection of successful mathematicians and completely antisocial people is a null set. Unless you're an actual genius, you simply cannot succeed in mathematics with getting along with other people.

So I can't just buy every math book I can find, read every paper I can find on the internet, all alone, and make any contributions? I have to talk to people?

Well, I live in social isolation, and I study math, but I can't quite recommend it, I think most people would have gone insane by now.

As far as whether it's 'okay' or not, who gives a shit about what is or isn't 'okay', think independently for christ's sake, OP

You have to talk to people. What you're talking about is the path to becoming either a crank or a person who spends his days proving trivial things nobody cares about.

You could, but I doubt anyone would take your work seriously, thing is there are so many papers published on a weekly basis that it's very difficult to keep track of what's new, even in a specialized field, because of that it simply goes down to what is most likely going to be the most informative and useful, those are usually journal publications, of which almost exclusively publish material from people in academia or in some private lab/institution.So you can still do maths, it's just that you won't be contributing to the larger maths community. It'll also be difficult to navigate the waters without someone more experienced first.

Attempting this will get you through undergrad, but it won't get you your PhD.

You need to have the social the social skills to collaborate with other mathematicians. There will, at some point, be a concept that a colleague is more familiar with. If you are unable to work with your colleagues, you will not be able to become successful as a mathematician. (i.e. many times published and with a comfy teaching position.)

I don't care about getting a PhD or having a teaching position. I have a good socially isolated software job that I will be content with forever, but I want something else to do with my life since I must be fucking autistic or something and have literally no capability to interact with people in a natural non-overthought ever since I was young so I was hoping maybe studying math would be a good replacement but I guess not.

if you don't care about success in publishing your findings and you don't care about becoming well known, then it doesn't matter what you do. Of course you can decide to study math in your free time, why would you not be able to?

You can do whatever you want with your free time, you're human.

Oh wait, if just want to learn math then you don't need to talk with people at all, it's only if you want to publish math. By all means learn as much as you want and talk to no one about it